


not hell but hell on earth

by Anonymous



Category: Jurassic Park (1993)
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Consent Issues, Creepy, Dinosaurs, Dubious Consent, F/M, Horror, Interspecies, Language Barrier, Other, Present Tense, Raptors Are People, Stockholm Syndrome, Unreliable Narrator, Vore, Xeno, a fix-it that breaks things more, anti-fix-it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-11
Updated: 2013-06-11
Packaged: 2017-12-14 14:51:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/838125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of a dinosaur and the man she loves (and kind of wants to eat).</p><p>While no archive warnings apply, this is horror, so please heed the tags.</p>
            </blockquote>





	not hell but hell on earth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [voksen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/voksen/gifts).



> ~~Okay, fuck it, I've had some time to process and I still have no idea what part of my brain this story came from or why I wrote horror when I don't enjoy horror, but I think it's a good story so I'm owning up.~~ Anon again for Reasons.
> 
> The mind's abysses are strange and uncharted, c'est la vie.

The man is alone, for once, no high sharp fences between them, none of his brothers or sisters with their sticks that cause sleep; he is soft and weak in his flimsy coverings, no match for one of the People. Wise Leader has watched him for so long, watched him with hot confused thoughts that tangle her like lianas; she feels some vague primal urge that has no outlet, she thinks of the chase and blood on her fangs, she thinks of desires she has no words for. 

Wise Leader waits, concealed by the leaves, her tail lashing slowly behind her. The anticipation is sweet, sweeter perhaps than its culmination can possibly be. Her eyes narrow; she scents the air, but cannot smell him over the mud and crushed leaves of the recent storm.

He turns, at last; his eyes widen and he makes a sound that is almost like words, but it is meaningless to Wise Leader. She has him at last, her claws closing on his shoulders as he struggles helpless under her weight. And finally, finally, her teeth sink into his flesh. The taste of his blood in her mouth is salt and iron, thick and rich, his flesh is hot and living, and yet—

—and yet. The prey-lust is no less strong than it was, but even more than she wants to eat him, she wants to _keep_ him. He is hers, hers at last, and if she eats him he will be gone.

She hisses a red-stained snarl at her sister Swift Claw, who jabs her muzzle at the man with more interest than Wise Leader would like. _You ought to share,_ Swift Claw says. _Don’t be selfish. I’m hungry._

But Wise Leader does not want to share this one with her sisters, no, he is hers, she has captured him and she will keep him. Swift Claw is careless; she had a pet once, one of the birds that sometimes cleaned their teeth or picked itchy biting insects from their hides. She had found seeds for it, and allowed it to roost on her shoulder at night. She had bragged of her pet; none of the others had a pet. And then one day Swift Claw had been bored and hungry and _snap!_ No more bird, only a few bloody feathers drifting slowly to the ground.

If she shared her human with Swift Claw then soon she would have no human at all.

 _No,_ Wise Leader says, _I am keeping him! Find your own if you like, but this one is mine. Mine!_ She glares, neck tensed, claws ready to lash out. 

Swift Claw tenses also, but after a moment she inclines her head, a gesture of submission. _Very well, I shall!_ She crashes away ungracefully through the brush, angry, but Wise Leader has no more thoughts to spare for her. Swift Claw will forget it soon enough, in the passion of the next hunt.

At Wise Leader’s feet the man whimpers, clutching his shoulder where the blood runs down, mingling with mud and rain into a red-brown mess. She hardly bit him at all, but his kind of animal is fragile, without tough hide or scales to protect them. She noses at his shoulder in concern, but cannot quite stop her tongue from darting out between her teeth, tasting blood again, salt-sweet and slick on her tongue.

He screams, a raw sound so like that of a wounded animal that she recoils, unsure how to reassure him. She will not leave him here, where anyone might eat him, but clever and strong as she is, she is not built to pick him up and carry him. He is too large, too unwieldy with his oddly-arranged limbs.

She noses at him again, moving as slowly as she can, as gentle as she would be with a chick, this time nudging his uninjured shoulder as he tries to shove himself away, succeeding only in working deeper into the muck of the jungle floor.

Wise Leader holds out a claw, hoping he will pull himself up. He can lean on her; or perhaps she can even coax him onto her back somehow, and carry him that way, although she has never tried such a thing. _I won’t hurt you again,_ she hisses. She is nearly sure it is true: the desire to possess is so strong in her breast, stronger than the desire for an egg, almost as strong as her lust for freedom had been, before the fences ceased to be sharp and she and her sisters had broken free into the rain-scented jungle, where they could chase and hunt instead of waiting for animals to be given to them, where they could seek revenge on their captors.

But of course he cannot understand. The humans do not speak, not as the People do, although Wise Leader is sure they are intelligent, not only mindless animals like the three-horns or the acid-spitters.

His face does something that fascinates her, twisting curiously so that his mouth turns up at the corners, and he makes a bubbling kind of sound. The humans have such strange faces, soft and mobile, and they are always changing them at each other, as if it means something. Interspersed with the bubbling are other, sharper sounds, which rise and fall in a pattern that remains elusively beyond her grasp.

But he reaches up, slowly, as though he fears she will bite his hand off—she pulls her head back, hoping he will understand—and takes her claw, and then he is standing, leaning heavily on her.

He follows her, still clutching his stick, which she will have to take away from him—it is no good if he can make her sleep whenever he likes—but for now, it is enough that he follows her, slow and shaky but _hers_.

* * *

The humans leave the island the next day, in metal boxes that whir through the air. Wise Leader is not sorry to see them go, and she hopes they will not come back. The island belongs to the People now, to her and her sisters. Already Sharp Fang has hidden a clutch of eggs in a secret place, where she tends them with the fierce pride of one who has something her sisters lack. The longing for eggs is a gnawing in Wise Leader’s belly, but she consoles herself with the man, who is finally hers. She knows he is not as good as eggs, but she wants him even more; the need to possess him is a fever that burns through her bones.

After Swift Claw cornered him, her claws poised to tear him open like a defenseless three-horn calf—Wise Leader had only been able to stop her by tearing her away from him and sinking teeth into her shoulder, a warning shake that left Swift Claw whimpering and cowering—he stops trying to run. Where would he go, with his sisters and brothers gone? They could not care much for him if they had left him behind. It is better for him to stay with Wise Leader: _she_ cares, _she_ will keep him safe. She will not be careless like Swift Claw and forget not to eat him, no matter how good he smells, even if sometimes he startles like prey about to run.

His shoulder heals. He no longer smells tantalizingly of blood and iron, and in time, he ceases to flinch away from her careful nudges most of the time. At night she pulls him down into the curve of her body, coiled her tail around them both and tucked her head against him. Let someone try to hurt him, with her claws and fangs to defend him! She will rend them, she will tear them, their blood would will her muzzle red and run down her throat.

Sometimes in the night, she half-wakes from vague dreams, disconnected images of the hunt, of rushing through bushes, of leaping and catching; the taste of meat; and strange feelings that simmer under her hide, warm and prickling. The humans did something to them, she thinks, they must have: she feels like there are gaps in her instincts, a loss of something she never had. But she and her sisters are the eldest. There is no one to explain to them what should fill those mysteries. Then her human stirs against her, his eyes a sleepy glimmer in the darkness, and he strokes her muzzle with soft, trembling hands, humming deep in his throat. She sleeps again.

During the day, Wise Leader sends him up a tree so she can hunt. His face does that strange twist again when she returns, flinging down some animal at his feet. He always sets a fire to char the food, as if it is not perfectly good as it is.

He does not share, but it does not matter. Swift Claw’s bird never shared its seed, either.

* * *

Without the humans, the island is a paradise. The larger animals begin the task of destroying the fences, now that they are no longer sharp; the jungle completes the task. Wise Leader and her sisters go wherever they please and hunt whatever they please. She gorges on the sweet, tender meat of grazer calves until her belly is distended and watches her human with a jealous eye, but Swift Claw continues to leave him alone, and he seems content enough to linger by her side, and wait for her in safety when she must leave him to hunt.

They learn to speak to each other after a fashion: he gestures with his long arms, pretending to bring food to his mouth, to tell her he is hungry. Wise Leader nudges him with her muzzle to direct him where to go. She begins to understand how his face twists: when the corners of his soft pink mouth turn up, he is pleased, except sometimes when he is not. When they turn down, he is unhappy.

The moon waxes and wanes twice and the rains pass, the rivers run low and the plains turn to the dust of the dry season, before he convinces her to go back to the the place where the humans built their boxes to hide. The jungle grows over them, vines digging into stone, rust eating metal, damp rotting wood; already the tops of the boxes collapse.

Inside is the beautiful destruction wreaked by her sisters and the great killer, the one who is their cousin but only an animal, not clever like the People. They had shown the humans that the island was not theirs; the humans would not return, Wise Leader thinks with satisfaction as she watches her human poke through the wreckage, picking up objects she has no words for. Some he hides away in his clothing, others in a sack of the same material that his coverings, now ragged, are made of.

His mouth is turned down again, and every so often he stops and covers his face with a hand. She does not like to see him sad. It hurts her, but not like the pain of a bite or a scored flank. The pain is not something in her body, to be healed by time or application of particular plants, but something unfamiliar that she does not know how to fix. 

They will go away from here, she will give him meat and he will burn it as he always does, and then his mouth will turn up again. The humans are not coming back, but she will not abandon him, and he will be happy.

He strokes a hand over her flank as they leave, casual and gentle, nothing like the rough affection of her sisters, and says something that—Wise Leader fancies, although his words still make no more sense to her than they ever have—sounds grateful.

* * *

Things change between them, after they visit the human boxes. The man touches Wise Leader more often: gentle strokes of her muzzle, wary of her teeth; brief thumps to her side that she thinks he means to be rough, except his strength is so little compared to hers that they are mere taps. She shudders, tail lashing, at the novel sensation, those vague ancestral urges that she does not understand rising impotently to the surface. He no longer flinches from her nudges at all, although he still stays close to her when her sisters are around.

Towards the end of the dry season, she brings him a fat duck, which he burns in the fire. The smell of hot fat dripping into the flame is surprisingly appealing; it makes Wise Leader’s mouth water, and when he tears off a piece and holds it out to her, his face twisted into a shape she has never seen before, she delicately plucks it from his hand, not letting her teeth even graze his fingers, and eats it.

It is politeness only—the burnt duck does not taste as good as it smelled, and she would have liked it better raw—but it is food that her human has offered her, like a packmate, and so it is the best meat she has ever eaten.

(Not as good, she is certain, as eating him would be—but she will not, no, she is still resolved, if she eats him he will become part of her, but he will not be hers.)

The man likes to groom himself in the river sometimes, where it is calm and shallow, stripping off his coverings. To Wise Leader’s eyes, he is no more vulnerable without them—he is always soft and unprotected without his stick—but she watches in fascination. Like the people, he walks on two legs, but his forelimbs are long, his torso curiously upright, his flesh pink and hairy like some of the small animals on the island. His eyes point forward like a predator, like hers, but they are sky-colored; his nose is so short it is more like a beak than a proper muzzle. And yet somehow she likes looking at him. She finds him beautiful. 

Underneath his coverings, his skin is pale, almost white. She wants to move closer, to slip into the water with him, to rub her muzzle against his shoulder and taste the water beaded there, the blood running hot just under his thin, tender skin.

He turns, his eyes widening as he realizes how close she’s moved, but doesn’t step away, only says something quiet in those strange, flat human words, lifting a hand a little as if he wants to touch her, too. Wise Leader wishes she could understand him—does he want to understand her?

Her muzzle is touching his shoulder now. He stands very still, and he smells like river water, like salt, like meat; she inhales, breathing him in, her jaws parting slightly, teeth grazing his skin. Slowly, slowly, he reaches out, tracing the ridge of bone and flesh over her eye, scratching along her nose, fingers smoothing over the thinner scales and more sensitive skin under her jaw. The sensation swirls through her, soothing and arousing at the same time. She has never been touched like this before, with such delicate care and wonder, and she pushes into his caressing hand, humming happily in her throat.

She lets her tongue dart out, tasting between his fingers, and his eyes go wide again; he makes a strangled sound, but he spreads his hand and lets her explore, lets her nose at the vulnerable junction of his shoulder and neck, gasps when she licks him under the ear, his flesh warm and river-flavored to the taste.

He is so fragile, so easy to hurt; the mere idea causes that strange insubstantial pain that is not in Wise Leader’s body, and yet her heart beats faster, as it does for the hunt. She lowers her muzzle, rubbing her face against his flank and belly, smelling between his legs, where he is shaped nothing like any animal she has seen, with flesh that hangs soft and delicate at first, but grows larger and firmer at the stroke of her smooth-pebbled scales against his skin. He makes sounds she has never heard before, loud and high, then muffled; when she tilts her head to look, she finds that he has sunk his teeth into his arm, biting himself. She does not understand.

She tastes him all over, even ducking her head underwater to lick his shins, his feet, although they taste of nothing but mud. If she cannot eat him, at least she can taste him.

When she lifts her head again, he is running his hands over the strong curve of her neck, shaping the muscles of her shoulders and haunches; he presses against her, his flesh bending to her tough scales, and his hips rub against her leg, slow at first and then faster and faster. She regards him in fascination: his eyes are squeezed shut, but something wet oozes from under his lids, like water.

She wants to taste that, too, but her mouth is too big and clumsy.

Her human stiffens suddenly, with a sound like he has been torn open. The image of that, his entrails spilling out hot and red and slippery-slick, steaming into the cool river, sends a long hot shudder through Wise Leader, a strange rippling satisfaction that makes her want to throw back her head and roar, triumphant and joyous.

Her leg is wet, the flesh between his legs soft again. He leans against her as if his legs can no longer support him, that bubbling sound coming from his throat, louder and longer than usual, with a strange sharp edge to it, but the corners of his mouth turn up, so Wise Leader hopes it is only another sign of happiness. She is happy, content to touch and be touched, basking in the warm sun on her scales and the coolness of the river around her claws. It is good to share this, whatever it is, with her human packmate.

She bends her head, licking at the pale liquid that came from his body smeared over her thigh. It is salty and faintly bitter, thin, without the thick richness or the iron of blood, but it still tastes of him, still a part of him that she can consume without eating him, and it thrills her. She licks carefully at her thigh, long sweeps of her tongue, so she will be sure to catch every drop.

When she looks up again, he is staring at her with the transfixed gaze of prey caught by the hunter. The bubbling sound dies away, and his mouth hangs upon, showing his blunt useless teeth. He says something, his voice shaking, and rubs a hand over his face, so Wise Leader leans down and rests her muzzle against his shoulder.

After a moment he turns his head a little, pressing his mouth against her jaw. He reaches up again, scratching at her eye-ridges, and she closes her eyes in contentment.

* * *

The wet season comes again, followed by the dry, more than once. The pack grows: Sharp Fang’s children are sleek and fierce, and if perhaps they are not quite so clever as their mother or aunts, well, it is only that they hatched after the humans left: their world has never been fenced.

The jungle consumes the human boxes entirely, except for the small one where her human keeps his objects and his coverings. That one he repairs, cutting wood and palm fronds to patch the roof, tearing vines away from the walls. He seems happiest when he has something to do, and Wise Leader likes it when he is happy, when he touches her with his soft clawless hands and presses his face against her muzzle and makes that bubbling sound that she thinks must be joy.

In time, she forgets that he ever fenced her in or forced her to sleep, that he ever hurt her, that he ever wanted nothing more than to see her dead.

Perhaps he forgets, too.

But she never forgets the taste of his blood on her tongue.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from _Beowulf_.


End file.
